Obsession
by windtear
Summary: Bella Swan and Alice Brandon have realised that their attraction to Edward Cullen and Jasper Hale borders on obsession - but pulling yourself back to sanity is easier said than done, and Jasper and Edward aren't helping. AU, AH, canon pairings.


**Disclaimer:** _Twilight_ is and remains the property of Stephenie Meyer, Little Brown, Summit Entertainment and all associated parties thereto. This fanfic is for entertainment only.

**Chapter One: Letting Go**

It was nine o'clock on an early Sunday evening in late summer, and amazingly enough for Forks, it was not a dark and stormy night. The skies were as clear as they ever get around here (that is, there were patches of clear sky) and there was no breeze. My best friend Alice and I sat in a small clearing in the forests that surround our little town, facing each other, our most prized possessions – my Edward collage and items, her Jasper Scrapbook and baggie of Things We Do Not Discuss (well, _she_ never discussed them) – beside us. Between us, we had cleared out a small circle of gound till it was completely bare and lined the edge with stones, making ourselves a small but serviceable fire pit.

"Matches?" Alice asked.

"Matches," I replied, handing them over. Alice's fine, short black hair ruffled in the breeze as she carefully lit some dead leaves and twigs that we had brought with us, building up a small fire. She blew on it a couple of times, and then the two of us just looked at each other over the flickering flames.

"Ready?" I finally asked her.

She swallowed, hard. "Ready," she answered, her voice quavering a little. I decided to start first, and dropped my packet of Edward Cullen's hair (obtained hair by hair from his haircomb during his gym period) onto the flames. It blackened and curled up and gave off a reassuring stink.

Getting rid of the obsession wasn't so easy, but without the physical reinforcement of my Edward Shrine, maybe, one day, it too would wither up and fall to ash. Maybe.

Alice carefully began to feed pages of the Jasper Scrapbook to the flames, and I pulled my Edward collage forward as she did, thinking about what we were doing and why.

Edward Cullen and Jasper Hale were two of the boys in our year at school. We had each fallen for them – I for Edward, Alice for Jasper – in the first week of freshman year. Us and every other girl in the class. Now, just about to become seniors, they were as utterly godlike as they ever had been. And Alice and I were as invisible as we ever had been, too. I because I was quiet and self-effacing, Alice because nobody wanted to pay any attention to the girl who always acted as though logic was an optional accessory. There was a persistent rumour going around that she was an untreated schizophrenic, too. Which wasn't quite true; Alice was in fact psychic, and had visions. She hated them, she told me; half the time they didn't make sense, and half of the other half of the time they only made sense afterwards. But the remaining quarter was quite enough to make her act in ways that made her seem utterly cuckoo to anyone who didn't know better. I'd only learned better myself the time she'd knocked me out of the way of a runaway van, a few months into our first year. I'd asked her how she'd known to be there, and it had all spilled out. I'd originally begun talking to her out of gratitude, but as I got to know her, I found I genuinely liked her. We'd become best friends and now we were inseparable. She was the only one who knew about my crush on Edward and my Edward Shrine; I was the only one she told about her thing for Jasper Hale and the Jasper Scrapbook. We hadn't recognised them as obsessions, then. It had seemed to us perfectly logical to follow them around, to watch them every chance we got, to collect their discarded scraps, to photograph them at every opportunity. They were blazing stars, after all.

But a week ago, Alice and I had sat down for our weekly movie marathon, and for some reason we'd picked movies that were all about stalkers – _Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, Swimfan_ – and when we went up to my room and looked at the Edward Shrine, well... Certain Similarities hit us over the head. Hard.

Nobody _wants_ to be a bunny-boiler, after all.

We talked about it for a week. I wept. She yelled. We both denied we were as bad as that, and then denied we were in denial. We looked at each other's collections and tried to say how sick they weren't. We looked at our own and tried not to think how sick they _were_. And we went over everything we'd ever said or done to Edward Cullen and Jasper Hale, and tried to pretend they'd ever noticed our existence.

Actually, I think it was pretty amazing it only took us a week to make the resolution to stop being sick like that.

Alice had fed half the Scrapbook into the fire, so I decided to come back to the party and began tearing off strips of the Edward collage and feeding it in. It hurt like hell, and I felt the tears start dripping... oh no, _again_.

"'Sokay, Bella," Alice whispered. "I know it hurts." I saw the snailmarks of tears on her own cheeks.

"Yeah," was all I felt comfortable saying, feeding another strip of glued-together photo in.

There was a rustling to one side of the clearing. We looked at each other and went to take a look. There were some broken branches and what looked to be an old hoofmark on the other side. "Deer feeding spot," Alice said definitively. "One must've arrived, seen the fire, and taken off."

"Why would a deer be feeding at -" I looked at my watch with its luminous hands - "nine-thirty-five in the evening?"

Alice shrugged. "I don't know, I'm not a deer. Let's get back to it."

"Okay."

Alice opened the baggie and shook the contents into the flames. I threw the broken comb and half-chewed pencil in. Alice dumped the bag itself on and I threw the other bits and pieces in. The flames leapt higher, gleefully consuming the artifacts of our insanity. We waited until everything had burned, stamping on the fire to put out its last embers.

"Now," I said decisively. I pulled the handwritten resolution we'd drafted out of my pocket and held it up so Alice could read it too. "I, Bella Swan -"

"And I, Alice Brandon -"

"Hereby resolve and declare that we will no longer be sick-minded stalkers. We will let go of the objects of our obsessions. We will move on, accepting that the objects of our obsessions are just that and nothing more. We will heal and through our healing become strong." We chorused. We looked at each other, and solemnly shook hands.

"Okay," I said. "Icecream, my place?"

"You read my mind," Alice grinned. We checked the fire one more time – Forks might be the wettest place on Earth, but if this was a deer feeding ground, it'd be a shame to give a burn to one – and headed back.

~*~*~*~

School started a week later. We went through our usual first day of school rituals: the Choosing of the Lockers:

"I've got 738."

"Mine's 219."

"Where is Ed... oh. Yeah. Um, where is the Queen Bitch's?"

"Dunno. Hey, Angela! Do you know where Lauren's locker is?"

"I saw her down around the seven hundreds."

"Okay, thanks Angela."

A few moments later...

"Hey, you're a freshman, right?"

"Yeah, and you're the crazy chick."

"Nice. I've got the locker next to you."

"So?"

"So, want to swap it for one right up the other end? Well away from me?"

"Okay."

"Well, _he_ didn't put up much of a fight."

"He was up against the crazy chick, he knew he didn't stand a chance."

The Comparing of the Schedules:

"Only homeroom and two classes together? I swear to God, the teachers are _trying_ to drive me insane. How do they do this every year?"

"It has to be deliberate. Maybe I can just sit in on your schedule? We're in the same classes, it's just the times are different."

"We never get away with it."

"Worth a try, though."

"No, it's not. We'll go see Mrs Cope after school."

But this year we didn't do the Snooping After Edward and Jasper's Classes, or the Locating of Edward and Jasper's Lockers. Not that we didn't _want_ to, but... we were letting go, we weren't going to stalk. We were going to be perfectly good and not ever see them again...

"Oof!"

"Sorry! Hey, you okay?"

I looked up at the person I'd accidentally run into and found myself looking at Jasper Hale. He was standing in the door way of Alice and my homeroom, looking as if he'd been entering, too.

"You're Bella Swan, right?" he continued. "Is your friend – oh, there you are! Hi, Alice."

I'd never seen Alice blush quite that red before. "Hi, Jasper," she whispered.

"Hey Jazz, what's the holdup – oh. Hi, Bella."

He was talking to me. -Edward Cullen- was talking to -me-. "Uh, hi, Edward," I managed to stutter out, and just stood there.

"What's going on?" Lauren Mallory's voice whined behind us, breaking Alice out of her paralysis. She grabbed my hand and we fled to the right-hand back corner of the classroom, where there were no windows and we could hide in the shadows.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," I muttered. "He knows my name. He said 'hi'."

"He said 'hi' to me," Alice added blankly.

We looked at each other.

"We're going to be good," I said firmly. "They're nice guys, that's why we liked them in the first place. Of course they say 'hi' to people."

Alice nodded in agreement.

"Now I get why you two are always in the Emo Corners," a rich masculine voice that I knew all too well said, and Edward dropped down into the chair in front of me. "Nice and quiet to finish catching the morning nap. Not nice not sharing, you two."

"Yeah," Jasper said, sitting down beside him, in front of Alice. "You should have told us this before."

That was when the teacher started taking attendance, and we had to stop talking.

~*~*~*~*~

Why was it, the second we had resolved to be good, suddenly the objects of our unrequited attractions started focussing on us?

My first class was English. I was sharing it with Jasper. Who asked to share a desk and proved to be a good seatmate. If we had not resolved to Be Good, I know Alice would have been quizzing me the second I told her.

My second class was Maths A. I knew Edward took Advanced Maths, but I hadn't known he was in my class. Or that he would be sitting next to me. I didn't look at him. Much. I swear. I was Being Good.

My third class was Spanish. At first I thought God was smiling on me, for I shared this class with Alice. But He was not on my side in this, for Edward and Jasper also were there. And sat next to us. And we all got assigned to each other for the speaking exercise. Which is why Alicia and Isabella blushed their heads off while Eduardo and Jose flirted with them, and we all got top marks for 'proving we all understood what we were doing with our authentic reactions'. Neither Alice nor I informed Senorita Villasquez that the guys could have been reading the telephone book and gotten the same reactions.

Fourth hour, thank goodness, was Art, and I had an hour of peace. We were working with clay this term, the teacher informed us, so next class we'd have to bring aprons and possibly a change of clothes. The thought of clothes brought with it the idea of showing off for... but I quashed that thought before I finished it.

Alice and I met up at our lockers to get out our lunches – we had chosen to brown-bag it, in order to avoid the cafeteria, and looking at Them. Maybe this would have worked. If Edward and Jasper didn't have lockers across the hall from us.

"So, which table are you sitting at this year?" Jasper asked us, slamming his locker shut.

"Um, the big oak tree outside," I replied. "Come on, Alice, we want a good spot!"

After I dragged Alice outside, we plonked ourselves down on the grass under the oak tree. Ack, from now on, bring a tarp or a folding chair or something; constant rain in Forks means a high water table which means wet ground which means wet butt if I'm not careful.

"Bella," Alice asked me, "did you notice if Edward and Jasper were at those lockers this morning?"

I looked over at her. "No-oh," I answered her slowly. "But they might have gotten there and put their stuff away before we did."

"I guess," Alice said slowly. "Today's just been all freaky coincidences, hasn't it? And it's -me- saying that."

"Tell me about it," I agreed. We both laughed. "But, you know," I added, "it would be so easy to fall back into the way it used to be."

She shivered. "Don't say that," she said quietly. "We can't let that happen. Tell me if you think you're falling. We can do this, Bella. We have to."

"Yeah," I replied. "I guess...."

She started to say something, but her eyes glazed over. I knew that look, and waited till she blinked and came back. Her face twisted into the oddest shape. "Well, now."

"Alice? What did you see?"

She looked at me oddly.

"Alice?"

She shook herself. "I saw – I saw your wedding, Bella."

"Oh?" I sat up. "Who do I marry? Don't tell me it's Jacob Black from the reservation."

"I couldn't see his face."

"Oh. Oh, well," I said, and then perked up. "You know, this means we win! If I fall in love with someone enough to marry him, it means I'm over Edward, and if I'm over Edward, you'll get over Jasper!"

Alice's laughter wasn't as light as it could have been, but I didn't notice that.

I didn't notice that Alice hadn't said she didn't know my would-be husband, either.


End file.
